It was such a simple storyline at the beginning: The Internal Revenue Service — one of the most hated Washington agencies — wrongly targeted tea party groups applying for a tax exemption.

Then Congress got involved.

Lawmakers have muddied the plot with strategic leaks of interviews conducted by congressional investigators with IRS employees involved in the scandal. The leaked transcripts grab headlines without offering much clarity.

More than a month after news of the target program surfaced, partisan brinkmanship on Capitol Hill is leaving the public confused about what really happened and who is to blame.

POLITICO reviewed hundreds of pages of transcripts to arrive at these takeaways about what we’ve learned so far about the IRS debacle.

Within hours of the IRS acknowledging the targeting practice on May 10, top Republicans immediately compared the activity to the political shenanigans of the Nixon era.

So far, there’s zero evidence to back up those accusations.

In fact, front-line employees in the IRS’s Cincinnati field office reject assertions that the White House was involved.

There was no reason for flagging those cases “other than consistency and identifying issues that needed to have further development,” said John Shafer, the self-described “conservative Republican” manager in Cincinnati who oversaw the screening group that singled out right-leaning groups.

Shafer told investigators he “had no reason to believe” the White House was involved, nor did he think any of his colleagues targeted groups as a result of political bias.

The GOP continues to argue that the targeting program is part of a broader effort by the administration to hobble its political enemies. Dick Cheney recently said the practice “was clearly used for political purposes.”

But even Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who helped lead the interviews that have surfaced, acknowledge in private that there’s no evidence of political motivation.

2. It really did start in Cincinnati

Some in the GOP continue to push back on suggestions that the targeting began anywhere but Washington.

“It’s clear this didn’t start with a group of ‘rogue agents’ in Cincinnati,” House Speaker John Boehner told CNBC on Thursday.

But from the evidence that has come to light so far, this doesn’t seem to be a program orchestrated from Washington. Witnesses have testified that Cincinnati IRS employees were the first to pull a conservative group for extra scrutiny.

Shafer, the IRS manager in Cincinnati, received an email from one of his employees in late February 2010 about a “high-profile” tea party group that had been in the news around that time. The employee flagged the group and said it might need extra scrutiny because it was interested in engaging in politics — actions that are limited by law for groups receiving a 501(c)(4) tax exemption.

Shafer agreed, pushing the case up the chain until it eventually wound up at IRS headquarters in Washington.

After Washington accepted the case, Shafer — on his own initiative — instructed his employees to keep their eyes peeled for similar cases. He told investigators he made that call without any direction from Washington.

When asked if he had been instructed to conduct more searches following the initial findings, Shafer said no.

“No one said to make a search,” Shafer said. He simply called his agents and told them “it was something we need to be aware of and we need to hold those cases until we have further direction.”

3. Washington made things worse

The targeting may have started in Cincinnati, but IRS officials in Washington failed to blunt what might have been a case of political tone deafness from snowballing into the agency’s worst crisis in years.

The transcripts paint a picture of an agency headquarters plagued by poor communication and mismanagement once it became aware of — and accepted responsibility for — the flagged tea party cases in early 2010.

Holly Paz, a former Washington manager in the IRS division with oversight of applications for tax exemptions, told IRS employees in 2010 to “hold” tea party cases they found. Some ended up sitting in limbo for years.

Paz was removed from her position earlier this month.

Washington officials were supposed to give Cincinnati screeners a template for approving or denying tea party cases early on, but it took them 13 months to follow through.

The communication process between Washington and Cincinnati was so “frustrating” that one Ohio employee, Elizabeth Hofacre, told congressional investigators she left her position over it.

When Washington finally got involved in the process, Hofacre said officials from the agency’s headquarters micromanaged her review of nonprofit applications — ultimately leading to big delays.

For example, Carter Hull, a Washington-based tax-lawyer working with her on the cases, sent Hofacre templates to use when writing to tea party nonprofit applicants, including questions she should ask about “emails, copies of Web pages, copies of literature from their events … any type of like constrictions or schedules, meet-ups.”

But later, when Hofacre started receiving answers from some groups, Hull stopped responding to inquiries in a timely fashion — and when she called to inquire about the status of certain groups he simply told her they were “under review.”

“All I remember saying and thinking is ‘this is ridiculous,’” she told the congressional investigators. “Because at the same time, you are getting calls from irate taxpayers. And I see their point. Even if a decision isn’t favorable, they deserve some kind of … timeliness, and it was just these applications and their responses were just being sent up there and I am not sure what was happening.”

4. Cincinnati screeners weren’t following consistent standards

When news about the IRS scandal first unfolded, both parties were appalled to learn that screeners were using terms like “patriot,” “9/12,” “government spending” and “make America a better place to live” in searching for applicants to pull for extra scrutiny.

As it turns out, those terms were never on the “be-on-the-lookout” list that was meant to flag tea party groups.

“They were never given criteria,” Shafer said, explaining that each screener was allowed to sift for cases using his or her own standards.

He said issues like “government debt” and “taxes” were “not something that was distributed to everybody because that’s not the way that we were conducting this. It was not a criteria-based anything.”

Gary Muthert, a screener who worked for Shafer, told investigators that he expanded his own search terms because he saw some groups didn’t use the word “tea party” in their titles or applications.

“I used ‘patriots’ because some of the tea parties wouldn’t — they would shorten their name to TP Patriots. I thought, OK, I will use ‘patriot,’ and I would see TP Patriots,” Muthert said. “And the 9/12, when you looked at the website, you would see the — these organizations. So I said, OK, I will use these to find the tea parties.”

5. Focus centered on conservative, not liberal groups

From the beginning of the scandal, lawmakers have tried to gauge whether left-leaning groups were given the same sort of scrutiny.

Most testimony shows they weren’t.

Although Paz told the Oversight panel that despite the nickname “tea party cases,” IRS employees were instructed to review all political cases, including liberal advocacy groups.

That runs contrary to what Hofacre — the person actually reviewing the cases — told investigators.

Hofacre said she “was tasked to do tea parties” only and never once reviewed a left-leaning group.

And although some screeners sent liberal groups her way, she just “sent those back to the specialists or the general inventory … because my function was to develop tea parties.”